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Comment by ghiculescu | Hacker News Reader

I can’t believe all the comments arguing that this is good for the Kenyans.

Yes, obviously this industry shouldn’t exist. But it does. Lots of industries exist purely to fix inefficiencies in others.

If there was other global knowledge work available to Kenyans I’m sure they’d take it. These people are writing college level essays! They are probably better writers than most of us.

When futurists talk about industrial revolutions they all agree that in the long term it works out but in the short term it causes lots of pain and suffering for those whose work is displaced.

If you’re an AI futurist you should be intellectually honest and admit that chatGPT is probably not going to be good for Kenya. Trying to dress it up as if there’s absolutely no downside to this is just lying to yourself.

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> If there was other global knowledge work available to Kenyans I’m sure they’d take it. These people are writing college level essays! They are probably better writers than most of us.

Shouldn't they be employed at improving their own country, since they are this smart? Instead of gaining from corruption and fraud on another continent?

If the smartest young people in your country have to move abroad or work remotely for foreign companies in order to make the most of their skills, then your country and society is a total failure - ask me if you want, I'm from one of those places.

So what, gathering capital from dumb kids so they can do things that matter to them is bad?

> so they can do things that matter to them

They can do what matters to them without cheating the system and getting rewarded a degree for it.

However the capitalist system is one in which you should be rewarded for outsourcing something you cannot do or cannot do inexpensively yourself. Organization and correct market theories are what's rewarded* in capitalism. Especially in business schools we should be focused on making people who have those skills and rewarding them for successfully doing it. IMO the real distortion is in overvaluing those who have a degree, many of which only proves they can show up on time, consistently, and do as their told.

* (amongst other negative forms like rent seeking etc I'm talking about the positive case here)

It's a lost opportunity and productivity loss. If the Kenyan writer was employed doing something that has a purpose, economic wealth would increase. Instead he/she is employed with helping incompetent people scam their way into jobs and positions where they will damage productivity.

The Kenyan is exporting intellectual work. That this may damage the corrupt system in the West seems like a US problem.

The question is how do you fix that situation?

It fixes itself over time.

Now these people will have to find other sources of income, and that will create economic and political pressures.

No, it doesn't fix itself because we have an unfair arrangement of opportunities around the world.

Different passports give different amount of travel freedom.

Some countries are stuck paying debts to other countries.

And so on...

Passport travel freedom is often caused by security and fraud risk.

This can be fixed by countries simply by making sure fraud and security risks can't end-up abroad.

I’m also from one of those places. I agree it would be good if local productivity improved.

But I don’t think the solution is for the west to ban people from bad countries making an income and bringing it home.

Well I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong for people in less developed countries to work for more developed countries. Even idealistically, the best state might be working for the first world to gain resources to send to the home country as it bootstraps itself into higher prosperity. The unfortunate fact is that highly educated people need infrastructure and stability to support that education, and therefore can gain many more resources working for developed countries than they can for their own. There just isn’t enough opportunity for education to push things forward without the infrastructure behind it.

Of course, yeah, relying on corruption and fraud from another continent to try and make a living you can’t make in your own country is a problem. When the issue is that local corruption is not just having them work for more developed countries, but having them abandon their home countries entirely, yeah that’s a big problem. But I don’t think there’s a problem with having people work remotely for foreign companies while their own country isn’t yet able to properly utilize their own skills yet.

> "gain resources to send to the home country"

The resources are already in their home country from the beginning. Then the local elite sell those resources to foreigners and leave their countrymen being poor. Since poor isn't stupid, those countrymen learn to write essays since learning is free. Then they work for foreigners to get some money, so they can buy resources. It's a circle of stupidity.

Everything in life is step by step. I completely understand those who emigrate or work for foreign companies instead of working on improving their country - I had to do that myself after fighting for many years. Nobody can be so patriotic that they throw their life away in that manner. What I don't understand is how the rulers can decide to continue on this road to ruin.

> Instead of gaining from corruption and fraud on another continent?

it's not corrupt nor fraud from the point of view of the kenyans. They are merely doing a transaction with a foreigner. As far as the kenyans are concerned, it's the foreigner who is defrauding the university for plagerism and cheating.

>Shouldn't they be employed at improving their own country, since they are this smart? Instead of gaining from corruption and fraud on another continent?

Causing political change is hard, and a different skill. You might as well as Silicon Valley engineers why they're not improving American policy instead of making advertisers slightly better at getting clicks.

Yet many people throughout the world have improved their countries massively and in short time. Note that I'm not saying these writers should make political change in Kenya - I'm saying that the people in power there should get their heads out of their asses and understand that they have to give better opportunities to skilled locals so that they don't waste their productivity by writing college essays for foreigners.

This only works if your country is self sufficient, from a resources standpoint and a IP standpoint. If you lack either, you participate in a global economy. And if you participate in a global economy, you need capital.

Say you’re the smart Kenyan who is willing to work. But there is no work in your country, or the only employment you can find is something that doesn’t use your intellect. You are that guy who can fix cars for a living, but there are no cars in the country. There are bicycles to be fixed, but they don’t pay enough to feed your family, or make progress.

You can choose to write essays, make money in dollars and afford a car. You can spend money in the local economy so that others can afford education, grow themselves and afford a car. Eventually you can create your own business locally to fix the cars. Or even better if you manage to make a lot of money, you can build a business that allows others to build their own business.

Or you could continue fixing bicycles, make no money and constantly worry about survival, and never do anything more than fixing bicycles.

And this is how capital and modern economics works. I’m also from one of those places. :)

Great counterpoint. Though I fear there is a moral hazard if ones wellbeing depends upon corruption, even far away. Corruption undercuts a stable and healthy society. Taken too far the rule of law becomes weakened, and that doesn't generally end well.

Maybe instead of fixing bicycles or facilitating scams they could just do honest remote work for richer societies?

Re: moral hazzard, it seems odd to me that the US college kids use this service without a second thought. I'm old (50's) and we thought having someone type (typewriter era) your essay after you hand wrote it was dishonest. :-) The only situation I can think of where I might have cheated without feeling bad was maybe using a calculator on math homework where it was forbidden?

> I fear there is a moral hazard if ones wellbeing depends upon corruption, even far away.

I don't see it that way. There's no moral hazard on the Kenyan side (they aren't the ones submitting work as their own). The same way a gun or car manufacturer isn't and shouldn't be liable for the criminal use of his product.

I could go on one of these market places and hire one of these Kenyan writer for completely legitimate reasons.

They could become more predisposed to participating in other future actions of corruption against their fellow Kenyans?

It’s often this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-deb...

“ Politics is the mind-killer. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you’re on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it’s like stabbing your soldiers in the back. If you abide within that pattern, policy debates will also appear one-sided to you—the costs and drawbacks of your favored policy are enemy soldiers, to be attacked by any means necessary.”

Can't you see how bad it for Kenya - or anywhere - for people bright enough to write college level essays to be wasting their time writing them for rich people studying in Western colleges?

What you do for a living isn't neutral, there's an opportunity cost. That person in Kenya writing an essay for someone else isn't doing journalism or writing a great novel, or starting a business or whatever. Now, for sure, Kenya isn't the best place for doing those things anyway, but it's never going to be if a whole pool of labor is doing bullshit work like grinding out college-level essays. There's no path from where Kenya is today (not great, not as bad as you might think though) to where the West is where work like that is a part of its economy, is there?

You can argue that about anything.

Can't you see how bad it for America - or anywhere - for people bright enough to understand stocks to be wasting their time selling stocks to rich people in Western countries

Economies are too complex to judge any one person’s choice of how they participate in them. If starting a business (or being a journalist or writing a novel) was a better idea, perhaps some of those Kenyans would have done that. But writing college essay brings (brought?) new money into Kenya that can be reinvested in new businesses, journalists, and novels. In the absence of non-corrupt foreign investment in Kenya I think this could be a big booster for their productive economy.

Or maybe not. But who are we to judge?

I don't see why price discovery in an information market is comparable to essay writing in search of a social credential for someone else?

> for people bright enough to write college level essays to be wasting their time writing them for rich people studying in Western colleges?

That's an issue for the American education system, not Kenya's population.

Came here to say this. Why are we worried about Kenya when we are cheating ourselves? The society that suffers when American students simultaneously defraud American universities, devalue American degrees, and cheat their own education — is America

It’s more complicated though, because many universities are defrauding the students as well with overpriced tuition and degrees with limited value. Basically, it is a circle of fraud with the Kenyans, in this case, selling the shovels to the suckers.

Meaningful work (generally) requires capital, and Kenya has very little capital. Capital has a compounding effect, so bringing in external capital now can pay dividends later.

Capital is an abstract. Kenya is rich AFAIK, and there's no material limit in how much they can continue to build up their nation.

It is very patronizing to think that these Kenyans have those kinds of opportunities, and have foolishly traded them in for a job writing essays. This is the best opportunity available to them at this time, and it is being taken away from them. If you think there were better opportunities they missed, then you are implicitly saying that they don't know what is best for themselves.

Having said all of that, let's not overstate the difficulty of writing college level essays, especially essays that are good enough for someone who isn't able to write such essays themselves.

> This is the best opportunity available to them at this time, and it is being taken away from them. If you think there were better opportunities they missed, then you are implicitly saying that they don't know what is best for themselves.

But the opportunities in Kenya weren't taken from them? That's what the poster is trying to explain: A country should make sure their brightest are gainfully employed and compensated. That's how you build a better nation.

Three parts of bugger-all is still bugger-all. Can't take opportunities that weren't there in the first place.

That's a very faulty understanding of economics and labour. Wealth is created by man interacting with nature. Most nations in the history of the world created their wealth without being dependent on foreign money. Of course there are endless opportunities in Kenya, just as in other countries. The limiting factors are political and/or cultural. If some of the most barren countries in the world could spawn rich nations, what's lacking in Kenya?

This depends solely on what you're defining as an opportunity. Are the job positions there today? I.e., the "opportunity" that's an alternative to writing essays for foreign nations? Not enough of them. Could they be after a long cascade of primary, secondary, tertiary and quaternary development? Yes. But they aren't there today. That's the key thing. People need to put food on the table today.

> A country should make sure

and the weather should make sure to rain often enough to not cause famine.

Now maybe they have more reason to try - since the college fraud money tap has been closed.

That is not what they are saying. They are saying that for the economy of Kenyan as a whole having a bunch of smart people writing essays for westerners does nothing to improve the local economy. If they are instead working to provide services or build infrastructure locally that will improve the economy for everybody there.

And where does this demand for their services come from locally?

The reality is that in most developing countries, the more you can “hide” your work from the government, the better. People are drawn to online work because the government doesn’t really understand it nor does it have a clear framework for regulating it. This means you can keep working without some government official asking for bribes and bureaucratic paperwork.

It's bold to assume that a significant number of them even have an interest in writing novels, are capable of writing fiction with ideas that are original enough to bring them a decent income or publishing deal. How often does that actually happen in the USA? Almost never. It's a dream that can't be reached.

Equally, how many journalists does a country need? Not everybody can be a novelist. Not everybody can be a journalist.

At least you admit that essays are bullshit work; they don't actually assess an individual whatsoever if they can be outsourced, and are thus not fit for purpose of assessing someone.

>Can't you see how bad it for Kenya - or anywhere - for people bright enough to write college level essays to be wasting their time writing them for rich people studying in Western colleges?

OR is it because this phenomenon is proof that the ability to write winning college degree level essays and dissertations and the accumulation of a industrial scale workforce of talent able to create such works over multiple sophisticated subject areas and subjects, has no benefits for a actual economy and can only persist as a activity if supported by a highly distorted systematic foreign reward arbitrage?

I don't understand this argument. The Kenyan is exporting essays to the United States. Would you also call it bad for Kenya if she were building cars for export to the United States? What's the difference? And an American who exports software or cars to Kenya—is this bad for the United States? I don't understand why.

I’m pretty worried about India. Pretty much all of our recent prosperity can be attributed to the tech sector. The bulk of this tech sector is outsourcing work, not high level architecture or design work.

I can imagine this entire sector being hollowed out completely within a few years, destroying the entire middle class.

I think too many companies have too much invested in their India teams for it to only take a few years for the sector to wind down. Short of some sort of calamity making it impossible for other counties to keep working with them, I suspect it would be a transition more over decades than years. (Even if AI is a looming issue, the sort of companies large enough to outsource are also the companies that will take the longest to truly realize AIs potential in their own workflows)

I’ve also worked with enough extremely skilled people out of India who were involved in architecture and design work that I think all the skill needed is present in the country for their own tech sector to sustain itself eventually. Now if the government and societal norms will allow that to actually come to fruition…less sure on that.

The market will force their hand. If your competitor replaces its entire customer service with AI agents that talk like real people with an American accent (the tech is almost there) and reports lower costs and higher profits, you will have no choice but to follow along.

India’s tech sector is almost entirely dominated by low paid, low skilled tech labor. TCS and Infosys combined employ over a million people.

To give you an indication of the skill gap, a fresh college graduate who joins TCS usually gets $4,500-5,000 per year. Meanwhile a VC funded startup product company will usually pay $30-40,000 per year.

I really don’t see how these $5k/year employees aren’t replaced by AI agents.

i haven't seen it posted before, but i've noticed many (if not all) Checker's (Rally's for some) burger restaurants have automated drive-thru order taker. You speak what you want and can upgrade sizes and so on and I've never had it not get my order correct.

Newer versions with the ChatGPT-like AI is definitely closer than people think. and Customer Service jobs are a very large amount of employment here and overseas. Bad for lots of people.

Altman did say that customer service jobs will likely be the first casualty. Voice AI is already close to human-like.

Countries like Phillippines will suffer a lot. In India, the BPO industry alone employs over 4M people, and this is the first step towards middle-class for a lot of people. If this is taken away, I don't know what they will do.

India at least seems to be attempting to homegrow multiple industries that the West typically specializes in (eg. Cars, heavy industry, tech at the lower levels of the stack). A country of their size with all that going for it probably wont be entirely screwed. I say this as someone whos parents came from Pakistan, at least you got some things going for you. I worry about the future of Pakistan: seems less certain...

> If there was other global knowledge work available to Kenyans I’m sure they’d take it.

I'm not sure the logic stands. Following the same logic, I can also argue that of course looting should not exist, but it does. Looter could've taken a decent job if they could find one. Plagiarism shouldn't exist, but it does. The cheating students could've avoid cheating if they could get higher scores so they can find a decent job. And on and on.

What's wrong is wrong. Period.

Looting is a crime.

Writing an essay isn’t. (Maybe it’s not allowed for the college student.)

Writing an essay for someone else is cheating. It's still wrong. Just not as punishable as a crime. BTW, cheating in Keju (Chinese imperial examination) is a capitol crime, as it undermined the fairness of the system and the quality of the ruling class, and derived the chances of other poor candidates. Not that I think cheating is serious, mind you, just wanted to give perspective on how different cultures perceive cheating and the underlying rationales.

I wont go as far as to say its "Good" full stop, but Kenya (and other less developed nations, relative to US) have an opportunity to base their economy on the next thing, rather than incumbents which must unwind policy and allow long term investments to fall to unacceptable ROI (often bankruptcy) ...

Consider telephone and credit card networks. Some countries skipped straight to mobile/wireless telephony (with internet!) while the US had to make the "this region already is wired, why are we putting a cell tower there?" (this played out in the 90s). Similar has happened with creditcard terminals in USA, where other countries got better infrastructure faster because there wasnt a competing incumbent investment in place.

Those Nigerian Princes sure are clever bilking people out of their savings, we should think of the consequences of removing the income of such clever groups. Yes these are people but that way leads to rot lets not normalize it unnecessarily, MHO!!!

The article is not about fraudsters

I am very worried about the potential impacts of AI across all societies. However, I think a reasonable argument can be made that providing all Kenyans access to the knowledge of ChatGPT could accelerate the nations development, rather than just eliminate all options. I’m not saying that is what will happen, but I am not sure AI futurists are lying to themselves. I don’t know how any side in this debate can be sure they are right. In fact, I think the best argument against the AI futurist argument is the wild uncertainty of what will happen and risks associated with that.

technology is always good, and if it's not good it's the users fault, and if it's not the users fault then it's society's fault and if it's not society's fault then you're just backwards and you want to die in a cave from pneumonia

I actually do think technology is mostly good, I just don’t like when people pretend it doesn’t come with consequences they don’t like.

Technology is neither good nor bad, it is neutral. How new technologies are used, however, depends on the people who reify them. We can apply them in ways that are helpful, harmful, or more often both.

It is incumbent on us to figure out how to implement and regulate new tech so that it appeals to the better angels of our nature, rather than encouraging the atavistic Hobbes-ian instincts which successful societies must overcome.

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